prosodyin modern criticism, the study of all the elements of language that contribute toward acoustic and rhythmic effects, chiefly in poetry but also in prose. The term derived from an ancient Greek word that originally meant a song accompanied by music or the particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Greek and Latin literary critics generally regarded prosody as part of grammar; it concerned itself with the rules determining the length or shortness of a syllable, with syllabic quantity, and with how the various combinations of short and long syllables formed the metres (i.e., the rhythmic patterns) of Greek and Latin poetry. Prosody was the study of metre and its uses in lyric, epic, and dramatic verse. In sophisticated modern criticism, however, the scope of prosodic study has been expanded until it now concerns itself with what the 20th-century poet Ezra Pound called “the articulation of the total sound of a poem.”

Prose as well as verse reveals the use of rhythm and sound effects; however, critics do not speak of “the prosody of prose” but of prose rhythm. The English critic George Saintsbury wrote A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present (3 vol., 1906–10), which treats English poetry from its origins to the end of the 19th century; but he dealt with prose rhythm in an entirely separate work, A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912). Many prosodic elements such as the rhythmic repetition of consonants (alliteration) or of vowel sounds (assonance) occur in prose; the repetition of syntactical and grammatical patterns also generates rhythmic effect. Traditional rhetoric, the study of how words work, dealt with acoustic and rhythmic techniques in Classical oratory and literary prose. But although prosody and rhetoric intersected, rhetoric dealt more exactly with verbal meaning than with verbal surface. Rhetoric dealt with grammatical and syntactical manipulations and with figures of speech; it categorized the kinds of metaphor. Modern critics, especially those who practice the New Criticism, might be considered rhetoricians in their detailed concern with such devices as irony, paradox, and ambiguity.

This article considers prosody chiefly in terms of the English language—the only language that all of the readers of this article may be assumed to know. Some examples are given in other languages to illustrate particular points about the development of prosody in those languages; because these examples are pertinent only for their rhythm and sound, and not at all for their meaning, no translations are given.

Elements of prosody

As a part of modern literary criticism, prosody is concerned with the study of rhythm and sound effects as they occur in verse and with the various descriptive, historical, and theoretical approaches to the study of these structures.

Scansion

The various elements of prosody may be examined in the aesthetic structure of prose. The celebrated opening passage of Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House (1853) affords a compelling example of prose made vivid through the devices of rhythm and sound:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper . . . .

Two phrases of five syllables each (“Fog everywhere”; “Fog up the river”) establish a powerful rhythmic expectation that is clinched in repetition:

This phrase pattern can be scanned; that is, its structure of stressed and unstressed syllables might be translated into visual symbols:

(This scansion notation uses the following symbols: the acute accent [] to mark metrically stressed syllables; the breve [˘] to mark metrically weak syllables; a single line [ | ] to mark the divisions between feet [i.e., basic combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables]; a double line [ ‖ ] to mark the caesura, or pause in the line; a rest [∧] to mark a syllable metrically expected but not actually occurring.) Such a grouping constitutes a rhythmic constant, or cadence, a pattern binding together the separate sentences and sentence fragments into a long surge of feeling. At one point in the passage, the rhythm sharpens into metre; a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables falls into a regular sequence:

The line is a hexameter (i.e., it comprises six feet), and each foot is either a dactyl (˘˘) or a trochee (˘).

The passage from Dickens is strongly characterized by alliteration, the repetition of stressed consonantal sounds:

Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs;

and by assonance, the patterned repetition of vowel sounds:

. . . fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among . . . .

Here the vowel sounds are symmetrically distributed: short, long and long, short. Thus, it is clear that Dickens uses loosely structured rhythms, or cadences, an occasional lapse into metre, and both alliteration and assonance.

The rhythm and sound of all prose are subject to analysis; but compared with even the simplest verse, the “prosodic” structure of prose seems haphazard, unconsidered. The poet organizes his structures of sound and rhythm into rhyme, stanzaic form, and, most importantly, metre. Indeed, the largest part of prosodical study is concerned with the varieties of metre, the nature and function of rhyme, and the ways in which lines of verse fall into regular patterns or stanzas. An analysis of “Vertue” by the 17th-century English poet George Herbert reveals how the elements of prosody combine into a complex organism, a life sustained by the technical means available to the poet. When the metre is scanned with the symbols, it can be seen (and heard) how metre in this poem consists of the regular recurrence of feet, how each foot is a pattern of phonetically stressed and unstressed syllables.

The basic prosodic units are the foot, the line, and the stanza. The recurrence of similar feet in a line determines the metre; here there are three lines consisting of four iambic feet (i.e., of four units in which the common pattern is the iamb—an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), which are followed by a line consisting of two iambic feet. Thus the stanza or recurring set of lines consists of three iambic tetrameters followed by one iambic dimeter. The stanzaic form is clinched by the use of rhyme; in “Vertue” the first and third and second and fourth lines end with the same sequence of vowels and consonants: bright/night, skie/pie, brave/grave, eye/pie, etc. It should be observed that the iambic pattern (˘) is not invariable; the third foot of line 5, the first foot of line 6, the second foot of line 9, and the first foot of line 13 are reversals of the iambic foot or trochees (˘). These reversals are called substitutions; they provide tension between metrical pattern and meaning, as they do in these celebrated examples from Shakespeare:

Macbeth

Meaning, pace, and sound

Scansion reveals the basic metrical pattern of the poem; it does not, however, tell everything about its prosody. The metre combines with other elements, notably propositional sense or meaning, pace or tempo, and such sound effects as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. In the fifth line of “Vertue,” the reversed third foot occurring at “angry” brings that word into particular prominence; the disturbance of the metre combines with semantic reinforcement to generate a powerful surge of feeling. Thus, the metre here is expressive. The pace of the lines is controlled by the length of number of syllables and feet, line 5 obviously takes longer to read or recite. The line contains more long vowel sounds:

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave . . .

Vowel length is called quantity. In English verse, quantity cannot by itself form metre although a number of English poets have experimented with quantitative verse. Generally speaking, quantity is a rhythmical but not a metrical feature of English poetry; it can be felt but it cannot be precisely determined. The vowel sounds in “Sweet rose” may be lengthened or shortened at will. No such options are available, however, with the stress patterns of words;

the word cannot be read .

Assonance takes into account the length and distribution of vowel sounds. A variety of vowel sounds can be noted in this line:

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright . . .

To borrow a term from music, the line modulates from ēē, through ā, ōō, ă, to ī. Alliteration takes into account the recurrence and distribution of consonants:

so cool, so calm . . .Sweet spring . . .

Rhyme normally occurs at the ends of lines; “Vertue” reveals, however, a notable example of interior rhyme, or rhyme within the line:

My musick shows ye have your closes . . .

Types of metre

Syllable-stress metres

It has been shown that the metre of “Vertue” is determined by a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged into feet and that a precise number of feet determines the measure of the line. Such verse is called syllable-stress verse (in some terminologies accentual-syllabic) and was the norm for English poetry from the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. A line of syllable-stress verse is made up of either two-syllable (disyllabic) or three-syllable (trisyllabic) feet. The disyllabic feet are the iamb and the trochee (noted in the scansion of “Vertue”); the trisyllabic feet are the dactyl (˘˘) and anapest (˘˘).

Following are illustrations of the four principal feet found in English verse:

Some theorists also admit the spondaic foot (′′) and pyrrhic foot (˘˘) into their scansions; however, spondees and pyrrhics occur only as substitutions for other feet, never as determinants of a metrical pattern:

It has been noted that four feet make up a line of tetrameter verse; a line consisting of one foot is called monometer, of two dimeter, of three trimeter, of five pentameter, of six hexameter, and of seven heptameter. Lines containing more than seven feet rarely occur in English poetry.

The following examples illustrate the principal varieties of syllable-stress metres and their scansions:

Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”(1815)

Syllable stress became more or less established in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400). In the century that intervened between Chaucer and the early Tudor poets, syllable-stress metres were either ignored or misconstrued. By the end of the 16th century, however, the now-familiar iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic metres became the traditional prosody for English verse.

Strong-stress metres

In the middle of the 19th century, with Walt Whitman’s free verse and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ extensive metrical innovations, the traditional prosody was challenged. Antecedent to the syllable-stress metres was the strong-stress metre of Old English and Middle English poetry. Strong-stress verse is measured by count of stresses alone; the strong stresses are usually constant, but the number of unstressed syllables may vary considerably.

The systematic employment of strong-stress metre can be observed in the Old English epic poem Beowulf (c. 1000) and in William Langland’s vision-poem, Piers Plowman (‘A’ Text, c. 1362):

These lines illustrate the structural pattern of strong-stress metre. Each line divides sharply at the caesura ( ‖ ), or medial pause; on each side of the caesura are two stressed syllables strongly marked by alliteration.

Strong-stress verse is indigenous to the Germanic languages with their wide-ranging levels of stressed syllables and opportunities for alliteration. Strong-stress metre was normative to Old English and Old Germanic heroic poetry, as well as to Old English lyric poetry. With the rising influence of French literature in the 12th and 13th centuries, rhyme replaced alliteration and stanzaic forms replaced the four-stress lines. But the strong-stress rhythm persisted; it can be felt in the anonymous love lyrics of the 14th century and in the popular ballads of the 15th century.

“Lord Randal” can be comfortably scanned to show a line of mixed iambic and anapestic feet; it clearly reveals, however, a four-stress structure:

A number of 20th-century poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, have revived strong-stress metre. The versification of Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943) shows the vitality of the strong-stress, or, as they are often called, “native,” metres.

Syllabic metres

Most of English poetry is carried by the strong-stress and syllable-stress metres. Two other kinds of metres must be mentioned: the purely syllabic metres and the quantitative metres. The count of syllables determines the metres of French, Italian, and Spanish verse. In French poetry the alexandrine, or 12-syllabled line, is a dominant metrical form:

Stress and pause in these lines are variable; only the count of syllables is fixed. English poets have experimented with syllabic metres; the Tudor poet Sir Thomas Wyat’s Wyatt’s translations from Petrarch’s Italian poems of the 14th century attempted to establish a metrical form based on a decasyllabic or 10-syllabled line:

Most ears can detect that these lines waver between syllabic and syllable-stress metre; the second line falls into a pattern of iambic feet. Most ears also discover that the count of syllables alone does not produce any pronounced rhythmic interest; syllabic metres in English generate a prosody more interesting to the eye than to the ear.

Quantitative metres

Quantitative metres determine the prosody of Greek and Latin verse. Renaissance theorists and critics initiated a confused and complicated argument that tried to explain European poetry by the rules of Classical prosody and to draft laws of quantity by which European verse might move in the hexameters of the ancient Roman poets Virgil or Horace. Confusion was compounded because both poets and theorists used the traditional terminology of Greek and Latin prosody to describe the elements of the already existing syllable-stress metres; iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic originally named the strictly quantitative feet of Greek and Latin poetry. Poets themselves adapted the metres and stanzas of Classical poetry to their own languages; whereas it is not possible here to trace the history of Classical metres in European poetry, it is instructive to analyze some attempts to make English and German syllables move to Greek and Latin music. Because neither English nor German has fixed rules of quantity, the poets were forced to revise the formal schemes of the Classical paradigms in accordance with the phonetic structure of their own language.

A metrical paradigm much used by both Greek and Latin poets was the so-called Sapphic stanza. It consisted of three quantitative lines that scanned

- ˘ - - - ˘ ˘ - ˘ - ˘,

followed by a shorter line, called an Adonic, - ˘ ˘ - - .

“Sapphics” by the 19th-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne shows the Sapphic metre and stanza in English:

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of ironStood and beheld me . . .Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalledShine as fire of sunset on western waters;Saw the reluctant . . . .

The same metre and stanza in German are found in “Sapphische Ode,” by the 19th-century poet Hans Schmidt, which was beautifully set to music by Johannes Brahms (Opus 94, No. 4):

Quantitative metres originated in Greek, a language in which the parts of speech appear in a variety of inflected forms (i.e., changes of form to indicate distinctions in case, tense, mood, number, voice, and others). Complicated metrical patterns and long, slow-paced lines developed because the language was hospitable to polysyllabic metrical feet and to the alternation of the longer vowels characterizing the root syllables and the shorter vowels characterizing the inflected case-endings. The Classical metres can be more successfully adapted to German than to English because English lost most of its inflected forms in the 15th century, while German is still a highly inflected language. Thus Swinburne’s “Sapphics” does not move as gracefully, as “naturally” as Schmidt’s. A number of German poets, notably Goethe and Friedrich Hölderlin, both of the early 19th century, made highly successful use of the Classical metres. English poets, however, have never been able to make English syllables move in the ancient metres with any degree of comfort or with any sense of vital rhythmic force.

The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow adapted the Classical hexameter for his Evangeline (1847):

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Longfellow’s Classical model, the opening line scans:

The rules determining length of syllable in Classical Greek and Latin poetry are numerous and complicated; they were established by precise grammatical and phonetic conventions. No such rules and conventions obtain in English; Robert Bridges, the British poet laureate and an authority on prosody, remarked in his Poetical Works (1912) that the difficulty of adapting English syllables to the Greek rules is “very great, and even deterrent.” Longfellow’s hexameter is in reality a syllable-stress line of five dactyls and a final trochee; syllabic quantity plays no part in determining the metre.

Prosodic style

The analysis of prosodic style begins with recognizing the metrical form the poet uses. Is he writing syllable-stress, strong-stress, syllabic, or quantitative metre? Or is he using a nonmetrical prosody? Again, some theorists would not allow that poetry can be written without metre; the examples of Whitman and many 20th-century innovators, however, have convinced most modern critics that a nonmetrical prosody is not a contradiction in terms but an obvious feature of modern poetry. Metre has not disappeared as an important element of prosody; indeed, some of the greatest poets of the modern period—William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens—revealed themselves as masters of the traditional metres. They also experimented with newer prosodies based on prose cadences, on expansions of the blank-verse line, and revivals of old forms—such as strong-stress and ballad metres. Also noteworthy are the “visual” prosodies fostered by the poets of the Imagist movement and by such experimenters as E.E. Cummings. Cummings revived the practice of certain 17th-century poets (notably George Herbert) of “shaping” the poem by typographic arrangements.

The prosodic practice of poets has varied enormously with the historical period, the poetic genre, and the poet’s individual style. In English poetry, for example, during the Old English period (to 1100), the strong-stress metres carried both lyric and narrative verse. In the Middle English period (from c. 1100 to c. 1500), stanzaic forms developed for both lyric and narrative verse. The influence of French syllable counting pushed the older stress lines into newer rhythms; Chaucer developed for The Canterbury Tales a line of 10 syllables with alternating accent and regular end rhyme—an ancestor of the heroic couplet. The period of the English Renaissance (from c. 1500 to 1660) marks the fixing of syllable-stress metre as normative for English poetry. Iambic metre carried three major prosodic forms: the sonnet, the rhyming couplet, and blank verse. The sonnet was the most important of the fixed stanzaic forms. The iambic pentameter rhyming couplet (later known as the heroic couplet) was used by Christopher Marlowe for his narrative poem Hero and Leander (1598); by John Donne in the early 17th century for his satires, his elegies, and his longer meditative poems. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), first introduced into English in a translation by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, published in 1557, became the metrical norm for Elizabethan drama. The period of the Renaissance also saw the refinement of a host of lyric and song forms; the rapid development of English music during the second half of the 16th century had a salutary effect on the expressive capabilities of poetic rhythms.

The personal element

A poet’s choice of a prosody obviously depends on what his language and tradition afford; these are primary considerations. The anonymous author of the Old English poem Deor used the conventional four-stress metric available to him; but he punctuated groups of lines with a refrain:

þaes ofereode: þisses swa maeg!(that passed away: this also may!)

The refrain adds something to the prosodic conventions of regulated stress, alliteration, and medial pause: a sense of a smaller and sharper rhythmic unit within the larger rhythms of the given metre. While the poet accepts from history his language and from poetic convention the structure of his metre, he shapes his own style through individual modifications of the carrying rhythms. When critics speak of a poet’s “voice,” his personal tone, they are also speaking of his prosodic style.

Prosodic style must be achieved through a sense of tension; it is no accident that the great masters of poetic rhythm work against the discipline of a given metrical form. In his sonnets, Shakespeare may proceed in solemn iambic regularity, creating an effect of measured progression through time and its legacy of suffering and despair:

No longer mourn for me when I am deadThan you shall hear the surly sullen bellGive warning to the world that I am fled . . . .“Sonnet 71”

Or he may wrench the metre and allow the reader to feel the sudden violence of his feelings, the power of a conviction raised to a command:

The first two feet of the first line are trochaic reversals; the last two feet comprise a characteristic pyrrhic-spondaic formation. A trochaic substitution is quite normal in the first foot of an iambic pentameter line; a trochaic substitution in the second foot, however, creates a marked disturbance in the rhythm. There is only one “normal” iambic foot in the first line; this line runs over (or is enjambed) to the second line with its three consecutive iambic feet followed by a strong caesura and reversed fourth foot. These lines are, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ terms, metrically “counter-pointed”; trochees, spondees, and pyrrhics are heard against a ground rhythm of regular iambics. Without the ground rhythm, Shakespeare’s expressive departures would not be possible.

A poet’s prosodic style may show all of the earmarks of revolt against prevailing metrical practice. Whitman’s celebrated “free verse” marks a dramatic break with the syllable-stress tradition; he normally does not count syllables, stresses, or feet in his long sweeping lines. Much of his prosody is rhetorical; that is, Whitman urges his language into rhythm by such means as anaphora (i.e., repetition at the beginning of successive verses) and the repetition of syntactical units. He derives many of his techniques from the example of biblical verses, with their line of various types of parallelism. But he often moves toward traditional rhythms; lines fall into conventional parameters:

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’dwith missiles I saw them . . . .“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865–66)

Despite the frequent appearance of regular metrical sequences, Whitman’s lines cannot be scanned by the usual graphic method of marking syllables and feet; his prosody, however, is fully available to analysis. The shape on the page of the lines below (they comprise a single strophe or verse unit) should be noted, specifically the gradual elongation and sudden diminution of line length. Equally noteworthy are the repetition of the key word carols, the alliteration of the s sounds, and the use of words in falling (trochaic) rhythm, “lagging,” “yellow,” “waning”:

Shake out carols!Solitary here, the night’s carols!Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols!Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!O under that moon where she droops almost down intothe sea!O reckless despairing carols.“Out of the Cradle”

No regular metre moves these lines; but a clearly articulated rhythm—produced by shape, thematic repetitions, sound effects, and patterns of stress and pause—defines a prosody.

Whitman’s prosody marks a clear break with previous metrical practices. Often a new prosody modifies an existing metrical form or revives an obsolete one. In “Gerontion” (1920), T.S. Eliot adjusted the blank-verse line to the emotionally charged, prophetic utterance of his persona, a spiritually arid old man:

The first three lines expand the pentameter line beyond its normal complement of stressed and unstressed syllables; the fourth line contracts, intensifying the arc of feeling. Both Pound and Eliot used stress prosodies. Pound counted out four strong beats and used alliteration in his brilliant adaptation of the old English poem “The Seafarer” (1912):

Here is the “native metre” with its falling rhythm, elegiac tone, strong pauses, and variably placed stresses. If this is free verse, its freedoms are most carefully controlled. “No verse is free,” said Eliot, “for the man who wants to do a good job.”

The prosodic styles of Whitman, Pound, and Eliot—though clearly linked to various historical antecedents—are innovative expressions of their individual talents. In a sense, the prosody of every poet of genius is unique; rhythm is perhaps the most personal element of the poet’s expressive equipment. Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, English poets who shared the intellectual and spiritual concerns of the Victorian age, are miles apart in their prosodies. Both used blank verse for their dramatic lyrics, poems that purport to render the accents of real men speaking. The blank verse of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842) offers smoothly modulated vowel music, carefully spaced spondaic substitutions, and unambiguous pentameter regularity:

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deepMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends,’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Browning’s blank verse aims at colloquial vigour; its “irregularity” is a function not of any gross metrical violation—it always obeys the letter of the metrical law—but of the adjustment of abstract metrical pattern to the rhythms of dramatic speech. If Tennyson’s ultimate model is Milton’s Baroque prosody with its oratorical rhythms, Browning’s model was the quick and nervous blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists. Characteristic of Browning’s blank verse are the strong accents, involuted syntax, pregnant caesuras, and headlong energy in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” (1845):

In the lyric genres, the rhythms of the individual poet—or, in the words of the 20th-century American poet Robert Lowell, “the person himself”—can be heard in the prosody. In the long poem, the dramatic, narrative, and didactic genres, a period style is more likely to be heard in prosody. The blank-verse tragedy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, the blank verse of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and its imitators in the 18th century (James Thomson and William Cowper), and the heroic couplet of Neoclassical satiric and didactic verse, each, in different ways, defines the age in which these prosodies flourished. The flexibility and energy of the dramatic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and John Webster reflect the later Renaissance with its nervous open-mindedness, its obsessions with power and domination, and its lapses into despair. Miltonic blank verse, based on Latin syntax and adaptations of the rules of Latin prosody, moved away from the looseness of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans toward a more ceremonial style. It is a Baroque style in that it exploits the musical qualities of sounds for their ornamental values. The heroic couplet, dominating the poetry of the entire 18th century, was unequivocally a prosodic period style; its elegance and epigrammatic precision entirely suited an age that valued critical judgment, satiric wit, and the powers of rationality.

It is in dramatic verse, perhaps, that a prosody shows its greatest vitality and clarity. Dramatic verse must make a direct impression not on an individual reader able to reconsider and meditate on what he has read but on an audience that must immediately respond to a declaiming actor or a singing chorus. The ancient Greek dramatists developed two distinct kinds of metres: “stichic” forms (i.e., consisting of “stichs,” or lines, as metrical units) such as the iambic trimeter for the spoken dialogues; and lyric, or strophic, forms (i.e., consisting of stanzas), of great metrical intricacy, for the singing and chanting of choruses. Certain of the Greek metres developed a particular ethos; characters of low social standing never were assigned metres of the lyric variety. Similar distinctions obtained in Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare’s kings and noblemen speak blank verse; comic characters, servants, and country bumpkins discourse in prose; clowns, romantic heroines, and supernatural creatures sing songs. In the early tragedy Romeo and Juliet, the chorus speaks in “excellent conceited” sonnets: in what was one of the most popular and easily recognized lyric forms of the period.

The metrical forms used by ancient and Renaissance dramatists were determined by principles of decorum. The use or non-use of a metrical form (or the use of prose) was a matter of propriety; it was important that the metre be suitable to the social status and ethos of the individual character as well as be suitable to the emotional intensity of the particular situation. Decorum, in turn, was a function of the dominant Classical and Neoclassical theories of imitation.

Theories of prosody

Ancient critics like Aristotle and Horace insisted that certain metres were natural to the specific poetic genres; thus, Aristotle (in the Poetics) noted that “Nature herself, as we have said, teaches the choice of the proper measure.” In epic verse the poet should use the heroic measure (dactylic hexameter) because this metre most effectively represents or imitates such qualities as grandeur, dignity, and high passion. Horace narrowed the theory of metrical decorum, making the choice of metre prescriptive; only an ill-bred and ignorant poet would treat comic material in metres appropriate to tragedy. Horace prepared the way for the legalisms of the Renaissance theorists who were quite willing to inform practicing poets that they used “feete without joyntes,” in the words of Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, and should use the quantitative metres of Classical prosody.

The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages little of importance was added to actual prosodic theory; in poetic practice, however, crucial developments were to have important ramifications for later theorists. From about the second half of the 6th century to the end of the 8th century, Latin verse was written that no longer observed the rules of quantity but was clearly structured on accentual and syllabic bases. This change was aided by the invention of the musical sequence; it became necessary to fit a musical phrase to a fixed number of syllables, and the older, highly complex system of quantitative prosody could not be adapted to simple melodies that must be sung in sequential patterns. In the musical sequence lies the origin of the modern lyric form.

The 9th-century hymn “Ave maris stella” is a striking instance of the change from quantitative to accentual syllabic prosody; each line contains three trochaic feet determined not by length of syllable but by syllabic intensity or stress:

The rules of quantity have been disregarded or forgotten; rhyme and stanza and a strongly felt stress rhythm have taken their place. In the subsequent emergence of the European vernacular literatures, poetic forms follow the example of the later Latin hymns. The earliest art lyrics, those of the Provençal troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, show the most intricate and ingenious stanzaic forms. Similarly, the Goliardic songs of the Carmina Burana (13th century) reveal a rich variety of prosodic techniques; this “Spring-song” embodies varying lines of trochees and iambs and an ababcdccd rhyme scheme:

Renaissance prosodic theory had to face the fact of an accomplished poetry in the vernacular that was not written in metres determined by “rules” handed down from the practice of Homer and Virgil. Nevertheless, the classicizing theorists of the 16th century made a determined attempt to explain existing poetry by the rules of short and long and to draft “laws” by which modern verse might move in Classical metres. Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster (1570), attacked “the Gothic . . . barbarous and rude Ryming” of the early Tudor poets. He admitted that Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, did passably well as a poet but complained that Surrey did not understand “perfite and trewe versifying”; that is, Surrey did not compose his English verses according to the principles of Latin and Greek quantitative prosody.

Ascham instigated a lengthy argument, continued by succeeding theorists and poets, on the nature of English prosody. Sir Philip Sidney, Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and Thomas Campion all (to use Saintsbury’s phrase) committed whoredom with the enchantress of quantitative metric. While this hanky-panky had no adverse effect on poetry itself (English poets went on writing verses in syllable-stress, the prosody most suitable to the language), it produced misbegotten twins of confusion and discord, whose heirs, however named, are still apparent today. Thus, those who still talk about “long and short” (instead of stressed and unstressed), those who perpetuate a punitive prosodic legalism, and those who regard prosody as an account of what poets should have done and did not, trace their ancestry back to Elizabethan dalliance and illicit classicizing.

Although Renaissance prosodic theory produced scarcely anything of value to either literary criticism or poetic technique—indeed, it did not even develop a rational scheme for scanning existing poetry—it raised a number of important questions. What were the structural principles animating the metres of English verse? What were the aesthetic nature of prosody and the functions of metre? What were the connections between poetry and music? Was poetry an art of imitation (as Aristotle and all of the Neoclassical theorists had maintained), and was its sister art painting; or was poetry (as Romantic theory maintained) an art of expression, and prosody the element that produced (in Coleridge’s words) the sense of musical delight originating (in T.S. Eliot’s words) in the auditory imagination?

The 18th century

Early in the 18th century, Pope affirmed, in his Essay on Criticism (1711), the classic doctrine of imitation. Prosody was to be more nearly onomatopoetic; the movement of sound and metre should represent the actions they carry:

’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,The sound must seem an Echo to the sense:Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;But when loud surges lash the sounding shoar,The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,The line too labours, and the words move slow;Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.

In 18th-century theory the doctrine of imitation was joined to numerous strictures on “smoothness,” or metrical regularity. Theorists advocated a rigid regularity; minor poets composed in a strictly regular syllable-stress verse devoid of expressive variations. This regularity itself expressed the rationalism of the period. The prevailing dogmas on regularity made it impossible for Samuel Johnson to hear the beauties of Milton’s versification; he characterized the metrically subtle lines of “Lycidas” as “harsh” and without concern for “numbers.” Certain crosscurrents of metrical opinion in the 18th century, however, moved toward new theoretical stances. Joshua Steele’s Prosodia Rationalis (1779) is an early attempt to scan English verse by means of musical notation. (A later attempt was made by the American poet Sidney Lanier in his Science of English Verse, 1880.) Steele’s method is highly personal, depending on an idiosyncratic assigning of such musical qualities as pitch and duration to syllabic values; but he recognized that a prosodic theory must take into account not merely metre but “all properties or accidents belonging to language.” His work foreshadows the current concerns of the structural linguists who attempt an analysis of the entire range of acoustic elements contributing to prosodic effect. Steele is also the first “timer” among metrists; that is, he bases his scansions on musical pulse and claims that English verse moves in either common or triple time. Modern critics of musical scanners have pointed out that musical scansion constitutes a performance, not an analysis of the metre, that it allows arbitrary readings, and that it levels out distinctions between poets and schools of poetry.

The 19th century

With the Romantic movement and its revolutionary shift in literary sensibility, prosodic theory became deeply influenced by early 19th-century speculation on the nature of imagination, on poetry as expression—“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” in Wordsworth’s famous phrase—and on the concept of the poem as organic form. The discussion between Wordsworth and Coleridge on the nature and function of metre illuminates the crucial transition from Neoclassical to modern theories. Wordsworth (in his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800) followed 18th-century theory and saw metre as “superadded” to poetry; its function is more nearly ornamental, a grace of style and not an essential quality. Coleridge saw metre as being organic; it functions together with all of the other parts of a poem and is not merely an echo to the sense or an artifice of style. Coleridge also examined the psychologic effects of metre, the way it sets up patterns of expectation that are either fulfilled or disappointed:

As far as metre acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprize, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation; they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus roused, there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a staircase, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.

Biographia Literaria, XVIII (1817)

Romantic literary theory, although vastly influential in poetic practice, had little to say about actual metrical structure. Coleridge described the subtle relationships between metre and meaning and the effects of metre on the reader’s unconscious mind; he devoted little attention to metrical analysis. Two developments in 19th-century poetic techniques, however, had greater impact than any prosodic theory formulated during the period. Walt Whitman’s nonmetrical prosody and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ far-ranging metrical experiments mounted an assault on the traditional syllable-stress metric. Both Whitman and Hopkins were at first bitterly denounced, but, as is often the case, the heresies of a previous age become the orthodoxies of the next. Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”—a rhythm imitating natural speech, using mixed types of feet and counterpointed verse—emerged as viable techniques in the poetry of Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden. It is virtually impossible to assess Whitman’s influence on the various prosodies of modern poetry. Such American poets as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Theodore Roethke all have used Whitman’s long line, extended rhythms, and “shaped” strophes.

The 20th century

Since 1900 the study of prosody has emerged as an important and respectable part of literary study. George Saintsbury published his great History of English Prosody during the years 1906–10. Sometime later, a number of linguists and aestheticians turned their attention to prosodic structure and the nature of poetic rhythm. Graphic prosody (the traditional syllable and foot scansion of syllable-stress metre) was placed on a securer theoretical footing. A number of prosodists, taking their lead from the work of Joshua Steele and Sidney Lanier, have recently attempted to use musical notation to scan English verse. For the convenience of synoptic discussion, modern prosodic theorists may be divided into four groups: the linguists who examine verse rhythm as a function of phonetic structures; the aestheticians who examine the psychologic effects, the formal properties, and the phenomenology of rhythm; the musical scanners, or “timers,” who try to adapt the procedures of musical notation to metrical analysis; and the traditionalists who rely on the graphic description of syllable and stress to uncover metrical paradigms. It is necessary to point out that only the traditionalists concern themselves specifically with metrical form; aestheticians, linguists, and timers all examine prosody in its larger dimensions.

Modern structural linguistics has placed the study of language on a solid scientific basis. Linguists have measured the varied intensities of syllabic stress and pitch and the durations of junctures or the pauses between syllables. These techniques of objective measurement have been applied to prosodic study. The Danish philologist Otto Jespersen’s early essay “Notes on Metre” (1900) made a number of significant discoveries. He established the principles of English metre on a demonstrably accurate structural basis; he recognized metre as a gestalt phenomenon (i.e., with emphasis on the configurational whole); he saw metrics as descriptive science rather than proscriptive regulation. Jespersen’s essay was written before the burgeoning interest in linguistics, but since World War II numerous attempts have been made to formulate a descriptive science of metrics.

It has been noted that Coleridge defined metrical form as a pattern of expectation, fulfillment, and surprise. Taking his cue from Coleridge, the British aesthetician I.A. Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) developed a closely reasoned theory of the mind’s response to rhythm and metre. His theory is organic and contextual; the sound effects of prosody have little psychologic effect by themselves. It is prosody in conjunction with “its contemporaneous other effects”—chiefly meaning or propositional sense—that produces its characteristic impact on our neural structures. Richards insists that everything that happens in a poem depends on the organic environment; in his Practical Criticism (1929) he constructed a celebrated “metrical dummy” to “support [an] argument against anyone who affirms that the mere sound of verse has independently any considerable aesthetic virtue.” For Richards the most important function of metre is to provide aesthetic framing and control; metre makes possible, by its stimulation and release of tensions, “the most difficult and delicate utterances.”

Other critics, following the Neo-Kantian theories of the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, have suggested that rhythmic structure is a species of symbolic form. Harvey Gross in Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (1964) saw rhythmic structure as a symbolic form, signifying ways of experiencing organic processes and the phenomena of nature. The function of prosody, in his view, is to image life in a rich and complex way. Gross’s theory is also expressive; prosody articulates the movement of feeling in a poem. The unproved assumption behind Gross’s expressive and symbolic theory is that rhythm is in some way iconic to human feeling: that a particular rhythm or metre symbolizes, as a map locates the features of an actual terrain, a particular kind of feeling.

The most sophisticated argument for musical scansion is given by Northrop Frye in his influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957). He differentiates between verse that shows unmistakable musical quality and verse written according to the imitative doctrines current in the Renaissance and Neoclassic periods. All of the poetry written in the older strong-stress metric, or poetry showing its basic structure, is musical poetry, and its structure resembles the music contemporary with it.

The most convincing case for traditional “graphic prosody” has been made by the American critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. Their essay “The Concept of Meter” (1965) argues that both the linguists and musical scanners do not analyze the abstract metrical pattern of poems but only interpret an individual performance of the poem. Poetic metre is not generated by any combination of stresses and pauses capable of precise scientific measurement; rather, metre is generated by an abstract pattern of syllables standing in positions of relative stress to each other. In a line of iambic pentameter

Preserved in Milton’s or in Shakespeare’s name . . .

the “or” of the third foot is only slightly stronger than the preceding syllable “-ton’s,” but this very slight difference makes the line recognizable as iambic metre. Wimsatt and Beardsley underline the paradigmatic nature of metre; as an element in poetic structure, it is capable of exact abstraction.

Non-Western theories

The metres of the verse of ancient India were constructed on a quantitative basis. A system of long and short syllables, as in Greek, determined the variety of complicated metrical forms that are found in poetry of post-Vedic times—that is, after the 5th century BC.

Chinese prosody is based on the intricate tonal system of the language. In the T’ang dynasty (AD 618–907) the metrical system for classical verse was fixed. The various tones of the language were subsumed under two large groups, even tones and oblique tones. Patterned arrangements of tones and the use of pauses, or caesuras, along with rhyme determine the Chinese prosodic forms.

Japanese poetry is without rhyme or marked metrical structure; it is purely syllabic. The two main forms of syllabic verses are the tanka and the haiku. Tanka is written in a stanza of 31 syllables that are divided into alternating lines of five and seven syllables. Haiku is an extremely concentrated form of only 17 syllables. Longer poems of 40 to 50 lines are also written; however, alternate lines must contain either five or seven syllables. The haiku form has been adapted to English verse and has become in recent years a popular form. Other experimenters in English syllabic verse show the influence of Japanese prosody. Syllabic metre in English, however, is limited in its rhythmic effects; it is incapable of expressing the range of feeling that is available in the traditional stress and syllable-stress metres.